Bitly has acquired social media publishing service Twitterfeed. I’m happy for Twitterfeed because Pulse2.com used them for publishing our blog posts to our Twitter account and it had worked out great. We had only recently switched to FeedBurner. The Bitly and Twitterfeed team are currently coming up with ways to combine their services to “make the social web a better place.”

URL shortening service Bit.ly previously charged for their premium service Bitly Pro. The advantage of Bitly Pro was the ability to create custom short domains. Some of their clients include gat.es (The Gates Foundation), diddy.it (Diddy), and cart.mn (South Park). Bitly Pro is now out of beta and is available for free and with no waiting charge. Register the short domain that you prefer to use and point it to Bitly’s servers. Then hook up your Bitly account at http://bitly.com/a/account. [Bitly Blog]

Popular URL shortening and analytics service Bit.ly has raised $8.9 million in Series B financing. This round of funding was led by AOL Ventures and RRE Ventures. Existing investors include Betaworks, O’Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures, Founders Fund, and SV Angel. Every day about 200 million Bit.ly short links are clicked on through Twitter and other services. Even though Bit.ly is no longer the default URL shortening service for Twitter, the traffic continues to grow for the service.

Domain name URL shorteners that end in .ly may be at risk by the Libyan government. Ben Metcalfe blogged that his domain name vb.ly was seized by NIC.ly, the domain name registry system for Libya. Vb.ly may not be the only short URL company to be at risk. Bit.ly, Ow.ly, and Ad.ly are all at risk. Below is some additional details from Metcalfe’s blog post:

Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) is rumored to have an interest in buying New York based URL shortening and tracking company Bit.ly. The talks are still in early stages. However if Bit.ly plans to sell, we could expect it to go for over $10 million given that they raised $3.5 million in VC funding from Ron Conway and other angel investors.

URL shortening service Bit.ly has been growing at an aggressive rate as they have become the default for Twitter. Given their current growth rate, the company needed another injection of cash as they have raised $1.5 million from previous investors. These investors include Betaworks, SoftTech (Jeff Clavier), Ron Conway, Mitch Kapor, Chris Sacca, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, and Howard Lindzon. The funding was added to an SEC filing and TechCrunch confirmed the round with Bit.ly President John Borthwick. The $1.5 million round was set up as a convertible debt note. Bit.ly received 2.7 billion clicks last month. last week alone about 744 million Bit.ly links were clicked on. [TechCrunch]

Bit.ly has launched a Pro service that allows custom short URLs owned by publication companies to have analytics services. Bit.ly will provide the analytics technology behind the custom short URLs owned by the publication companies. As part of the beta program, publications with short URLs such as AOL, TechCrunch, IGN, The Wall Street Journal, GDGT, MTV, MSN, and The Huffington Post will have reports on how many people clicked on a link, where the visitors came from, etc.

A dashboard will be added to the real-time analytics service provided by Bit.ly. This is very useful to publication companies that experience volumes of traffic from Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, e-mail, IM services, and SMS. Below are a couple of screenshots of the new service. The announcement was made on the Bit.ly blog.

The short URL battle is heating up as Google and Facebook have entered the mix. Google’s short URL is called goo.gl and Facebook’s short URL is fb.me.

Bit.ly is the biggest URL shortening service thanks to the popularity of Twitter.  Given that websites and files are masked by Bit.ly, spammers and virus artists are taking advantage of the situation.  A normal message may be followed by a Bit.ly URL that links to a malicious website.  In a blog post from earlier today, Bit.ly announced that they are partnering with VeriSign, Websense, and Sophos to scan through links and identify which of them are spam are viruses.  Bit.ly has about $2 million in funding and became the Twitter default URL shortening service in May 2009.  Bit.ly is based in New York City.